Archive for 2012

The Library of Congress today named 25 motion pictures that have been selected for inclusion in the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress. Among them is Sons of the Desert (1933), a riotous comedy that starred Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, along with comedian Charley Chase. Veteran director William A. Seiter for Hal

Wheeler Winston Dixon talks about how he went about researching his latest book, "Death of the Moguls: The End of Classical Hollywood," in which he describes the last days of the studio system and its “rulers of film” – moguls like Harry Cohn at Columbia, Louis B. Mayer at MGM, Jack L. Warner at Warner Brothers, Adolph Zukor at Paramount, and Herbert J. Yates at Republic.

Film-ratings systems in the United States have a history of contention. But one aspect of early attempts to impose a code, in the 1930s, has been largely overlooked, according to William D. Romanowski.

Jeremy Hicks set out to expand the visual record of the Holocaust by seeking out Soviet contributions to it. In "First Films of the Holocaust: Soviet Cinema and the Genocide of the Jews, 1938–1946" he urges historians to take into account a corpus of film that the West has little heeded.

You'll find descriptions of plenty of new and recent books relating to moving-image archiving on our books pages. You can also read about how authors went about the archival tasks needed to complete some of them.

Trevor Griffiths had a wide-open research topic when he decided to write a book about Scottish film-going habits of the early 20th century and to set them in social and historical context. In his new book, The Cinema and Cinema-Going in Scotland, 1896-1950, from Edinburgh University Press, distributed in the US by Columbia University Press),

Writing a history of cinema in Prairie Canada from the earliest days of film until current times does not get done without an awful lot of hard grind in archives. Tamara and Robert Seiler describe their work.

As is often the case, summaries of plenty of new books have been added to our Books pages. You can read summaries of books, and in some cases authors’ thoughts on the process of searching through archives for the material they needed.

The Open Video Project is an effort to standardize access to online moving-image content. But it also has become a popular site for viewing out-of-the-way video clips – ethnographic film, early experiments in film making, and much else.